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This is exactly it. Applications are one thing, and Wine has more than got that covered. The interesting bit with ReactOS is, if they can get the Windows driver compatibility polished, is it's potential to replace aging Windows based appliances. As just one example, there are a lot of factories out there with hulking machinery with old Windows based interface boxes. These are using proprietary drivers for proprietary interfaces, with zero chance of being supported on Linux or any other OS. Having a modern replacement OS that can use these drivers and applications could be a big plus. Some of these machines have a 30 year life expectancy with maintenance, so there is a need.

I can't remember the exact URL but I remember reading that situations like that are actually one of the explicit target use cases for ReactOS once it's more stable and complete. (Which isn't surprising. After all, it's the main situation where neither "just buy new hardware" nor "pay CodeWeavers to patch Wine up to perfect compatibility with your in-house app" are viable options.)

I don't get why doing an OS who's windows compatible. I mean Windows is ( imo ) full of bad decision and works badly. Why would you copy an OS like that ? For fun maybe but I don't see any other reason.

You said it yourself: it is your opinion. It makes sense to do so if they believe otherwise (and most of the developers there, do).

So why shouldn't they continue using Windows? It's not like using ReactOS means added security. There are probably many more security issues in ReactOS now than a sp3 Windows XP.

Security is not part of the equation since these types of appliances are often not even networked. The advantage is simply being able to use newer hardware, but still be backwards compatible with ancient drivers for proprietary interface hardware. The driver compatibility is what makes this interesting at all.

Then again, these days virtualization solutions like KVM have really nice passthrough capabilities, so this use case could be obsolete before ReactOS even gets to that point.

My 2 cents

Originally Posted by Arkhchance

I don't get why doing an OS who's windows compatible. I mean Windows is ( imo ) full of bad decision and works badly. Why would you copy an OS like that ? For fun maybe but I don't see any other reason.

Good point.
In the UNIX-world, I consider compatibility with Windows backwards-compatibility.
WINE did it just right by bringing in a well-fitting interface to the operating system. If you plan to go as far as bringing driver-compatibility, it goes down to the Kernel-level and is especially hard considering Microsoft's Kernel-interfaces aren't documented well.

Then again, these days virtualization solutions like KVM have really nice passthrough capabilities, so this use case could be obsolete before ReactOS even gets to that point.

I've seen software licensing hardware dongles for machine control hardware that were impossible (at least at the time) to be made operational using any kind of passthrough with virtualization. That may have been worked out in the years since I tried to get that working, not sure.

Although I do feel that adding an additional stack to worry about would not be desirable in some cases and if presented with the two options. Moreover, if there are any NEW installations for which a company could use the vendor's older software for some piece of equipment but for the lack of valid XP licenses, then I could see use cases where this would be a good thing to avoid being out of compliance on their licensing.

If they want to aim for any of the current XP users they have to have something stable by the end of support for XP in 2014 which is very unlikely to happen. By the time ReactOS would come out with something stable 2-3 years from now, those that were on XP would've moved on.

There are people still running Win95....
I 2015 there will be still a lot of WinXP-powered machinery...